As a result of increasing freight transport by general cargo and consolidated cargo shipping, truck or container transport, sea freight or air freight parcel transport in the scope of e-commerce and online mail order supplies, the number of transported goods and in particular of parcel consignments and consignments has increased significantly. Although it is nowadays possible for an order to be placed online independently of conventional shop opening hours, the delivery of the order as a consignment to the recipient takes place almost exclusively by conventional delivery methods, for example through the post or, in the case of parcel consignments, by way of motorized delivery vehicles and mainly only within shop opening hours.
If the recipient of the delivery is not available, for example because, as a working person, they are working during shop opening hours, either an attempt is made to deliver the consignment once again or the consignment is stored at a branch of the delivery organization in order to be retrieved by the recipient. Although it has been possible for some time to store consignments at a collection point, for example in a Packstation, such collection points are not yet available everywhere and thus not always an alternative.
Therefore, in recent times, attempts have increasingly been made to deliver consignments to the recipient or the collection point by unmanned, airworthy transport apparatuses, also known as parcelcopters or drones. In these attempts, a receiving container for receiving the consignment is usually used, to or from which the transport apparatus can convey or retrieve the consignment. Such a receiving container can be set up in the front yard of a recipient's house or be provided as a collection point for a plurality of recipients in a municipality and allows access to the consignment even outside shop opening hours.
In the abovementioned attempts, the actual transfer of the consignment between the unmanned transport apparatus and the receiving container has proven to be particularly difficult. For example it is not possible to “jettison” the consignment from the transport apparatus onto the receiving container when fragile consignments are being transported. Therefore, gripping apparatuses have been tested, but these cannot reliably hold all types of consignment. It is difficult for a gripping apparatus to implement the receiving of different consignments in undefined positions. Alternatively or additionally used exchangeable transport boxes require a large number of actuators for opening the boxes and loading and unloading consignments, and in this regard are also not practicable and are moreover costly.